“... shape it for us. ‘Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill’: in these lines the beauty of the London morning is evoked and confirmed through a comparison with what it is not, and the speaker’s own situation comes to be seen as it would be if he were standing not in the city but in a more characteristically ...”

“... uncompromising and deeply protective. She shied away from the lens, her most recent biographer, Peter Kurth, explains, because ‘she could make no natural motion while posing for the camera.’ Natural motion – as opposed to the engraved arcs and acrobatic tricks of classical ballet, the swooning decadence of the waltz or the silliness of social dancing ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... responsible for the new Bethlem madhouse, the Royal College of Physicians, the Fish Street Hill Monument to the Fire, the Haberdashers’ School, Montagu House in Bloomsbury, Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, Ramsbury Manor in Wiltshire, the Fleet Ditch, the reconstructed Tangier Mole, and possibly several more of the rebuilt City churches than the three ...”

“... rocker or other shot by a jealous girlfriend in a motel room. For those who have previously read Peter Makin’s extraordinary book Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse, Alldritt’s book may well seem meagre, even superficial. But the books are different in kind and, I think, the judgment unfair. Makin’s was the second full-length study of Bunting’s ...”

“... Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on ...”

“... women’s huts were torched by a Langda war party. Many of the Una men who struggled slowly up the hill to fight them were killed. Their bodies were carried to Langda, five hours’ walk away and, she believed, eaten. ‘How does human flesh taste?’ I asked. ‘Like pig,’ Caleb interrupted. ‘It’s just meat,’ another villager added. The Una seemed to ...”

“... Fall To drudge in furrows till you drop Is to be born. Mother of God Out of the mild mothering hill And the chaste burn. Simon God-begun, the barley rack By man is borne. These are the first five sections of ‘From Stone to Thorn’, republished in full in Brown’s sonorously essential Collected Poems, and the first of his works to be set to music by ...”

“... of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set you’d find in which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and ...”

“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... it was recovered; even more remarkable, seven hundred hours of work by luthiers at London’s W.E. Hill and Sons, founded in 1762, restored it to supposedly better shape than before.The recovery​ of Hermann’s cello is Kennedy’s sleuthing triumph. He had been given the Gagliano in 1928 by Louise Bachiene and Jaap de Graaff, wealthy Dutch admirers of his ...”

“... never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the appeal against the demolition of the chapel of the old Boys’ Home in Regent’s Park Road and the construction of some frightful block of flats. Church packed, people standing at the back, and though the audience is a bit sticky to start with ...”

“... Most men when? Enright’s review begins (a hilarious category mistake) by comparing Nabokov to Peter De Vries: ‘whereas De Vries despairs of his fellow beings without ceasing to love them altogether ...’ My pop-eyed italics. The friend of the world is nigh. But love is an exclusive emotion. Loving mankind is a logical contradiction, produced by too ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road ...”